Can This Beach Be Saved?

The white sands of the Florida Panhandle are some of the finest in the world. When the Gulf oil spill came ashore, it jeopardized not only a whole economy but a national treasure. Bob Payne returns to the beaches of his youth to report on the disaster from the front line

The beaches of Perdido Key, a sand–sculpted barrier island near Pensacola, were among the first in Florida to be assaulted by the massive leak resulting from the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe. I know Perdido Key because I was born in Mobile, Alabama, an hour or so away by car, and when I was a kid I spent some of my summers on the beaches just to the west of it. In fact, Lost Key, which is how Perdido’s name translates from the Spanish, is partly in Alabama and partly in Florida, the state line marked most prominently by the Flora–Bama, a sprawling, ramshackle beach bar locally famous for its annual mullet–tossing competition.

I’d learned how to swim along that coast, and build sand castles, and wipe the messy residue of tar balls off my feet, using, in those days, a gasoline–soaked rag. The tar balls would come up on the beach occasionally, sometimes the size of a doormat but typically no bigger than a quarter. Some were from the bottom of the Gulf, people said, the end result of natural seepage that had been going on forever, and some were from ships that flushed their tanks before heading up Mobile Bay. They were hard, usually, and if you squeezed them no harder than you would to break the skin of a boiled pea, they opened to reveal a gooey inner core. On a dare, some kids would chew them like gum, the only apparent risk being that you might get your bottom blistered by an irate parent.

Following the Deepwater Horizon spill, I was among the first journalists to arrive on Perdido Key. I know I was among the first because as soon as I got there, I visited the Gulf Islands National Seashore, which covers nearly sixty percent of the island, and asked the ranger at the gate how many reporters he’d seen.

“I live with one,” he said, “so counting her and you, two.”

Compared with the events that immediately followed the disaster, the first tar balls that washed onto Perdido Key, fifty days after the leak began, might have been seen as of relatively little concern. Arguably much worse were the massive amounts of oil spilled into the fragile estuaries of coastal Louisiana, with tragic consequences for wildlife, the decimation of the commercial fishing industry along much of that coast, and the possible loss of thousands of jobs associated with an oil industry that contributes significantly to the economic well–being of the region. All were instantly seen as national crises on the scale of Hurricane Katrina and, still in our collective psyche more than two decades later, the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska.

Yet in its own way, the oil at Perdido Key hinted at a crisis to come, indeed a crisis already in the making, one that might easily rank with those others and, because of the importance of clean beaches to Florida tourism (which in 2009 contributed $66 billion to the state’s economy), might in some ways overshadow them.

In addition to the oil inundating the Louisiana coast, some of it, scientists feared, would get caught up in the Gulf Loop Current, source of the powerful Gulf Stream, and be transported down around the Florida Keys and up along the beaches of the East Coast as far as Cape Hatteras. (As of midsummer, that fear was still unrealized.) Much of it, though, pushed this way and that by seemingly fickle winds and currents, slowly made its way east toward the Florida Panhandle. And the beaches of the Panhandle, although best known to Southerners, generations of whom have been drawn to them in an attempt to escape the summer heat, are in fact a unique national treasure, a two–hundred–mile stretch of what Professor Stephen P. Leatherman, a coastal scientist also known as Dr. Beach for his annual ranking of the nation’s best, calls the “greatest strand of pure white sand on earth.”

And the westernmost extreme of that great strand is the beach at Perdido Key, which seemed likely, because of the way the plumes were drifting, to serve as a bellwether for what might happen to every Florida beach where oil washed up.

In actuality, Florida’s first tar balls from the Deepwater Horizon spill came ashore on Pensacola Beach, just east of Perdido Key. But a few days later, when I arrived on the key, they were already there. Scattered among the scalloped line of tide wrack that shorebirds find so interesting, they resembled fingernail–size chips of ebony–hued driftwood—except that they glistened in the sunlight, and if you held them under your nose and squeezed, they smelled like the service bay at a gas station and left your fingers stained oily brown.

The economic effect was immediate. Visitor accommodations on Perdido Key consist almost entirely of condo rentals, with some sixteen hundred units available. Within days of the first oil, Perdido Key Area Chamber of Commerce Chairman Fred Garth estimated that condo–rental cancellation rates for the summer high season were around thirty or forty percent. Some local real estate agents put it at closer to fifty. The spill, according to one Florida economist, who assumed a fifty percent drop in tourism on the state’s Gulf Coast, might cost Florida $10.9 billion and put 195,000 people out of work.

Ironically, the initial assault of tar balls had disappeared the day I met with Garth. They’d been raked up by BP–hired crews, and at that point, no more oil had followed. The beaches were as white as the sugar they are often compared to, and the clear, calm water was the light green that gives the Panhandle its nickname, Emerald Coast. Beach umbrellas were everywhere, swimmers were in the water, and five–year–olds with shovels and pails were proving that the building of sand castles is not a lost art.

Then, some three weeks later, weeks during which emotions ran from hope to denial to anger to despair, the oil that was everybody’s nightmare started washing ashore. On Perdido Beach, cleanup crews picked up more than five tons of tar balls in a single day. On Pensacola Beach, Florida Governor Charlie Crist knelt in front of gooey mats of oil staining the sand as they melted like road tar in the summer sun. “Unbelievable,” he said, shaking his head in disgust.

As the oil tracked slowly east, tar balls and then larger mats of oil began showing up on beaches all the way down the Panhandle. While it was clear that the economic damage the oil would inflict would be tremendous, there were some shreds of argument that suggested it could have been far worse.

Chief among them is the fact that, environmentally, the best thing that can happen when oil washes ashore is that it ends up on a beach. Beaches are not as active biologically as estuaries, so less damage is done to plants and animals. Beaches are also far easier to clean than estuaries, and the beaches of the Panhandle, whose fine–grained sand is not as permeable to oil as coarse–grained sand, are easier to clean than most. The important thing, said Professor Leatherman, is to clean them quickly, before the oil is buried, where it can remain for years, perhaps until it is uncovered by hurricane tides.

Then there’s the argument that beached tar balls don’t appear to pose a serious health threat to humans. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, brief encounters with small amounts of oil will do no harm. People with sensitive skin may develop a rash, and it can be irritating if it gets in your eyes, but the CDC goes so far as to say that even swallowing up to a coffee cup full is “unlikely to have long–lasting health effects.”

Somewhat reassuring, too—considering our propensity for causing environmental disasters—is that when oil from the Deepwater Horizon well, which was at least temporarily capped by mid–July, does stop washing up, Florida’s beaches should begin to heal themselves. Beaches around the world seem to have done it, most notably in the Persian Gulf following the massive deliberate spill by the Iraqis at the end of the first Gulf War.

I’ve seen it myself in South Texas. In 1979, a well blew out in Mexican waters, gushing millions of barrels of oil for nearly ten months, floating tar balls ashore at least as far away as Miami. In the United States, the most visible effect was on South Padre Island, a Texas resort area where tourism took a brutal hit when oil invaded its beaches. Yet a few years later, when I walked on the beach there during the no–vacancy craziness of Spring Break, not a sign of oil was to be found—unless you wiggled your toes too far down into the sand, uncovering an ill that would take a few generations or more of hurricane tides to cure.

Now, though, as I walked the beach at Perdido Key, I thought about, and was reassured by, the belief many Panhandle residents have in their own resiliency. Fred Garth was living on Perdido Key in 2004 when it was slammed by Hurricane Ivan, “one of the most impactive and destructive hurricanes to Florida’s Panhandle coast in recorded history,” according to a report by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection. “We made it through Ivan,” Garth told me. “We’ll make it through this.”

Then he went for his daily walk on the beach, looking for tar balls but hoping to find only sugar–white sand.